Tuesday, November 25. 2008

UK Releases "Place Matters" Location Strategy for UK

The report had been held up, (I noted it in my coverage of AGI GeoCommunity exactly a month ago) but is now available free here.

The press release explains there's a five point approach:

The Location Strategy sets out a Five-Point Action Plan for public services that will help them to:

- know what data we have and avoid duplicating it
- use common reference data so we know we are talking about same places
- share the data easily through common technology, standards and business relationships
- gain the appropriate skills to support its use
- drive strong governance to enable change which will be led by the Location Council which is being set up by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

AGI (Association for Geographic Information) offers its take here, which basically supports these five ideas and notes AGI's work in these areas.

Tim Warr (Multimap) offers his quick take specifically noted the push for eased licensing.

Ed Parsons seems to be suggesting something about a job in Southampton (home the Ordnance Survey)...

These goals do not sound like any really new (for any country) tackling geodata issues/use but they do highlight how complex it can be to actually get them done! This looks like a decent reference document for any country (or smaller region) to explore when considering its spatial data infrastructure (SDI).